Flags and the Politics of Pageantry in Colonial Uganda

Abstract This article explores the politics of pageantry in colonial Uganda. As activists looked toward independence, they engineered competing visions of national material culture. Creating political emblems raised complex questions about the moral and theological significance of party colours. Throughout Uganda’s colonial history, debates about flags reflected sectarian struggles between Protestant and Catholic communities that dated to the late nineteenth century. In imperial and Ugandan history writings, flags are often associated with the pageantry of conquest or eventual post-colonial state building. But we know very little about the internal debates that accompanied the invention of the state’s material culture. This article pushes us past a superficial association of flags with either colonial conquest or Cold War liberation and into the conceptual and religious worlds that undergirded the hoisting of flags. Arguments about flags propelled Ugandan politics throughout the twentieth century. By looking at the varied ways that activists imagined the materiality of post-colonial Uganda, we can develop new approaches to intellectual history writing, moving into highly contested visual terrains where patterns, theologies of colour, and struggles to standardize party and national flags animated political mobilization and dissent.